Adobe Photoshop Celebrates 21 Years

I love sending greeting cards, I just never get them out on time. Fortunately, I think the folks at Adobe are going to have a lot of greetings coming their way, so my tardiness will be excused.

This past Saturday - February 19th - Adobe celebrated the 21st birthday of one of their most popular products, Adobe Photoshop. When Thomas and John Knoll (how many times have you seen those names on the opening screen) approached Adobe with their idea for a program to manipulate pixels in digital images, few people realized just how popular their new software would be. The rest, as they say, is history.

Early versions of the program featured color balance and correction, as well as levels and curves adjustments. The Clone Tool, however, forever changed the way we looked at image enhancement and retouching. What began as a simple display program has evolved into what is easily considered the industry standard for photographers and many graphic designers. Photoshop claims over 10 million users worldwide!

My introduction was with Photoshop 7.0. The brand-new healing brush tool was yet one more advancement in the way we would manipulate digital files and made blemish retouching almost effortless. With CS5, we're now on version 12 . . . easily converting camera raw files to jpg and batch processing through Bridge.

In addition to the name of our industry's most revolutionary software, the term "Photoshop" has gained use as a verb. While I am hardly what one would call a "Photoshop geek", I marvel at the way this industry has changed so quickly in such a brief time frame.

Last year, Adobe released a retrospect on all of the Photoshop products. Check out Photoshop's timeline here: http://www.photoshop20anniversary.com/

Thanks, Adobe, for 21 years of giving us the awesome tools we need to become even better photographers and photographic artists!

- David Grupa